


The Boy, the Scientist, and the Man

by orphan_account



Category: Power Rangers, Power Rangers Dino Thunder
Genre: Adopted Children, Body Horror, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Father-Son Relationship, Gen, Guilt, Hurt/Comfort, I Will Go Down With This Ship, Mistakes, Past Mind Control, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Psychological Horror, Recovery, Self-Indulgent, people being supportive of each other, science gone wrong
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-18
Updated: 2018-01-30
Packaged: 2019-02-16 08:33:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,706
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13050351
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: The twists and turns of Anton Mercer's life, presented in short scenes and not in chronological order.





	1. During: His Battle

**Author's Note:**

> My take on Anton is that he generally meant well but made a lot of mistakes thanks in no small part to pride on the level of hubris. Also, I'm a sap at heart, and somehow Anton/Elsa became one of my favorite ships in all of Power Rangers. :') I hope you enjoy this exercise in self-indulgence. This will be updated sporadically at best.

_If I don’t let myself feel emotions, will he still be able to force the change?_

Anton splashes water on his face and shuts the tap. Every other trick he’s tried has failed. In fact, he’s only been getting worse, growing weaker. He’s always on guard, always anxious and afraid, not at all the father he promised he’d be or the man he’d envisioned himself becoming.

Then again, he hadn’t expected to create a monster. All those experiments he’d done, the research he’d shared with Tommy Oliver, had been meant to do _good_. In a world where money moves mountains and science is the code underlying all things, they were as gods.

Until a single creation rebelled.

Straightening, he grabs a towel and pats his face dry. For a while, he stays like that, eyes shut, deep breaths, the fabric pressed to his skin. Then he holds his breath, lowers the towel, and opens his eyes.

It’s still him in the mirror, his blue eyes with the dark circles underneath them, still his hair, still his teeth when he bares them to check for the monster’s fangs. His heart is hammering in his chest, a symptom of the fear that he is going to try and control from now on.

He can do this. He _will_ do this. He _created_ this problem; he can certainly undo it.


	2. After: Dreamers

“Anton?”

He takes a deep breath when he looks up, as if he’s coming out of a trance. He may as well be. Even just reviewing the results of this past week’s round of experiments takes him there, and he’d only gone and taken part of them once or twice, so busy with meetings with the board as the month-end numbers come in. He’d been so far gone that he hadn’t noticed the world around him, how Elsa had set down the resumes she’s been reviewing, the ones she’d meant to look through last night.

It’s July, and the sun is bright and already hot on this early Saturday morning. He remembers, though, the conversation at sunset, about the teacher who retired without warning (“My fault,” she’d said. “I walked into his classroom as—well, on a mission, and I guess he can’t bear to work with me anymore.”), and the search for someone to replace him. He feels badly now; she’s working, using up time she could spend relaxing, all because they’d decided talking about everything and nothing was a better way to spend an evening together. He should have insisted—but then, she’d smiled and laughed so much. _Both_ of them had.

And more importantly, she had been the one to set the folder aside and say she’d leave it for later.

None of that really matters now, though. They’d made their choices, and here they are now, Elsa lying on her stomach and propped on her elbows, Anton sitting with his back against the headboard, both of them with work to do.

He meets her gaze with a smile, small but sincere.

And before he can speak, she asks, “What did you dream last night?”

His smile falls away, and he lowers his gaze. The question isn’t _did you dream last night,_ but _what did you dream,_ which means that, despite his best efforts to lie still upon waking, he’d managed to wake her up.

“Well…” he says, then sighs. It’s one thing to listen to her talk about her nightmares; it’s entirely different to even think of sharing his own. He’s the one who brought all of this on them, after all, on them and the others. It seems right for him to keep this to himself. It’s hypocritical more than noble, though, and it’s never more obvious than in this moment.

“It’s fine if you don’t want to tell me.” She glances away, biting her lip. “It’s just—you don’t talk about it much.”

“I don’t usually like to,” he admits quietly.

“I just don’t want you to think you _can’t_ , if you ever do want to.”

Right away, he shakes his head. “I don’t think that.”

“Good. Anyway, I just thought it could help. I don’t mean to force—”

“No, you aren’t. I’m—” Sighing sharply, he puts the report on the nightstand, then turns to face her, meeting her gaze again only for a moment. “I’m just looking for the right words.”

She nods, then sits up, tucking her legs under herself, rolling her shoulders, and shutting the folder with the resumes. Giving him time to think, he realizes, but still he can’t come up with what to say.

He looks at her again and opens his mouth to say that he doesn’t know, when she cuts him off, voice gentle and warm.

“Start with his name.”  
  
“Mesogog,” he says, shutting his eyes, as if that’s some sort of charm against the memories that name evokes. It works. He’s not immediately anxious, and the words start to come to him. “He was in control, but not transformed. He was the one moving me, from the inside. I was fully conscious. And he—”

Even knowing the dream is long since over, it’s too immediate. He is there again, in the island lair’s lab, looming over the subject strapped to that chair, pointing all sorts of contraptions at the half-conscious human staring back at him, wide-eyed, shaking, _begging_ him to stop.

“He had Trent.” Anton feels sick at the too-vivid memory of it all, so he takes a deep breath and finishes in a rush, “He was making me torture Trent. As myself.”  
  
“Oh _god_ _._ ”

Turning his head away, he opens his eyes. In his peripheral vision, he sees Elsa with a hand over her mouth. It’s almost enough to drown out the voice from the dream, saying words that are always the same and always as painful. _What about this upsets you so much, Mercer? I’m only doing to his body what you’ve already done to his heart. I’m helping you do what you’re too weak to do without me._  
  
“Said it was what I wanted anyway,” Anton continues, voice rough. “What I was doing anyway.”  
  
“No,” she tells him, tone sharp and firm. Her teacher voice, authoritative and full of conviction. “I don’t believe that for a second. You would _never_ hurt Trent, not on purpose.”  
  
“But I did, didn’t I?” That’s what it always comes back to. It may not have been on purpose, but his mistake had consequences that will last all of them a lifetime. Trent, who he’d promised to protect and care for, suffered so much over it; and Elsa, who he’d hoped to come to know and to build something beautiful with, came far too close to having everything she knows ripped to shreds.

Leaning his head against the wall, Anton sighs heavily. Mesogog almost never laughed, but he can feel the sadistic satisfaction the monster indulged in. It burns in his bones as if to turn them to ash from the inside out.

“I have that nightmare all the time,” he says, looking up at the ceiling. “I’m sorry I woke you over it.”

“Of all the things you’ve apologized for, that has got to be the one that least merits it.” She shakes her head, and with a small sigh, she goes to him, abandoning the folder with the resumes to take his hand in both of hers and sit at his side. “Anton. You’ve seen me at my lowest. You’ve seen me _cry_. This—it’s all right. It doesn’t bother me. It’ll be okay, just like you said.”  
  
For a few seconds, all he does is stare at the ceiling, but the silence soon becomes too much to bear. “Yeah,” he breathes, and he forces a slight, brief smile. When he says everything will work out, he means it.

Just not for him.

She rests her head on his shoulder, and as if she knows what he’s thinking, she says, “ _Kia kaha_.”

_Be strong_. Words of comfort and encouragement. He knows them from when she murmurs them to herself in the moments before he comes to her when it all becomes too much.

The truth of it is that she is much stronger than him. All of them are, Trent and Tommy and the other Rangers. They’re strong, they’re brave, and they’re going to achieve whatever they go after, in spite of everything, all while he stays behind and gives them what support they can.

“You, too,” he tells her, leaning his head against hers.


	3. Before: The Boy's Tale

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You can’t convince me Anton never loved Trent. You can’t convince me the hurtful things he did weren’t done out of desperation because he felt he was going to lose to Mesogog and he wanted Trent to be able to take care of himself in the only way Anton could think of. (He's not free of guilt, but I don't think he was malicious.)
> 
> You can, however, convince me to take a walk outside and care about rl. I'll do that. :')

* * *

 

Before Mesogog, there was a boy.

His father ran a major company and had all the answers, but the boy read books and asked questions about everything.

Why is the sky blue. How do fish breathe underwater. What makes some stars brighter than others. Why does the ocean have waves. How does electricity work. Why did dinosaurs die. Where did people come from.

“One day you’ll be able to pay people to ask those questions for you,” his father told him once, reaching for the big, black phone on his desk. “For now, I’ll pay someone to show you the answers.”

So he grew up learning the laws of physics when other children learned to swing a bat at a ball or throw a ball through a net. He learned how to run a company and make money grow on its own. He learned that his net worth made him desirable in his family’s world while his inclination to stay in the lab made him anomalous. He learned to follow his heart and honor his father’s wishes.

He learned to care for his teammates and to turn his sorrow over their deaths into love for their son.

“I miss them, too,” he tells the little boy. “But I promise— I promise I’ll be a good father to you. I’ll take care of you. You’ll have everything, just like I did.”

Trent throws his arms around him and hugs him tight, and as Anton returns the embrace, he sees they’ll have more than he did. He’d been a solitary boy who’d known in an abstract sense that his parents loved him, but Trent will have friends and, as long as it’s within Anton’s ability, never doubt that his adoptive father cares.


End file.
